How Multi-Currency Virtual Accounts Are Powering International Businesses

Companies are tapping into Virtual Account’s multi-currency capabilities to unlock new business benefits.

In the past, sending and receiving money cross border required wading through complexity. From the challenge of opening multiple foreign bank accounts in every country you do business, to dealing with high transaction and FX fees, to the burden of managing numerous bank accounts for each market and currency. 

Virtual Accounts offer unique functionality and convenience that addresses all of these issues, including: 

• Collecting online and offline payments 
• Low-cost foreign exchange
• Holding funds in multiple currencies

With these capabilities, it’s easy to understand how this increasingly popular technology can unlock cross-border business opportunities.

How Do Virtual Multi-Currency Accounts Work?

Many companies making international payments must go through a lengthy and manual process of opening up bank accounts in all the countries they do business in. With a virtual multi-currency account, you can make receiving international payments faster, easier, and simpler than ever. 

A virtual multi-currency account acts as an alternative to opening bank accounts in different countries. Virtual Accounts give their users the functionality of a bank account to collect payments. VAs can also be used in conjunction with other services like Rapyd Disburse, giving businesses the ability to disburse funds with multiple payment methods. Virtual Accounts unlock additional benefits from speed to security to multi-currency capabilities. 

Before using multi-currency Virtual Accounts, international businesses struggled with:

• Opening multiple foreign bank accounts
• Multi-Use Virtual Accounts
• High transaction and FX fees
• Lack of transparency and high administrative burden of managing many bank accounts in each local market and currency

Virtual accounts let you address all these challenges and more. Rapyd customer Lano provides a perfect example of the capabilities and opportunities of using multi-currency accounts.

Lano: A Virtual Multi-Currency Account Case Study

Lano is a remote employment platform based in Germany. They help companies hire, manage, and pay their global teams. Today Lano stays ahead of the competition by using Rapyd Collect, Disburse, and Virtual Accounts with multi-currency capabilities to deliver a seamless payment experience for client companies and their international workers. 

Contractors and remote workers need to be paid on time and in local currencies, but cross-border payouts are slow and expensive for both parties. Using multi-currency Virtual Accounts and Rapyd Disburse, Lano’s clients can now payout to global employees and freelancers faster in their local currencies with lower fees – even if those workers don’t have traditional bank accounts. 

Rapyd gave Lano the solution they needed to provide cost-effective and easy cross-border payout solutions to reach workers across Europe, Latin America and Asia. 

Benefits of Rapyd’s Multi-Currency Virtual Accounts

The flexibility of multi-currency Virtual Accounts makes them an increasingly popular tool for global businesses. They can radically streamline processes and are simple to use too, creating new business opportunities for a range of diverse clients. Here are top benefits for multi-currency Virtual Accounts.

• Avoid Opening Foreign Bank Accounts – And Get Paid like a Local: With Virtual Accounts, you can be located anywhere in the world and still enjoy the convenience of collecting online and offline payments as if you had a local bank account. 
• More Control, Fewer Costs: Avoid the administrative costs associated with managing banking and Foreign Exchange (FX) fees. Cut through the regulatory complexity of managing multiple bank accounts in each local market and currency to greatly simplify the resources of doing business globally.
• Let Customers Pay With Local Bank Transfers In Their Own Currency: You can set up as many Virtual Accounts as you need. You can use them in both online and offline settings and offer your customers the ability to pay in their own currency using a local bank account.  Because Virtual Account numbers (vIBANs) are multi-use, customers can use the same number to send repeated payments over a long period.
• More Organization and Transparency: Send numerous Virtual Accounts payments to one or multiple Rapyd accounts.  Grouping payments like this simplifies reporting, increases funds visibility, and allows you to keep using established processes to view, track and reconcile payments.  Plus, collected funds through VAs can be sent to suppliers and vendors using our Rapyd Disburse capabilities.
• Get Recipients Paid Faster In Local Currency: Convert payments to multiple currencies so clients from different countries can pay with bank transfers in their local currencies to avoid losing money on the conversion.

Leverage Multi-Currency Accounts For Global Growth

Multi-Currency Virtual Accounts can solve your biggest international payment challenges. For more and more businesses, the choice to use Virtual Accounts is clear. Make international payments faster, cheaper and easier than before by giving your customers and employees the ability to pay and be paid via Virtual Accounts.